Tweet

Open any government laptop in Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, or Warsaw and the chances are overwhelming that it runs Windows, logs into Microsoft 365, and stores its files in an American cloud. This is not an accident of history but the result of decades of procurement decisions, institutional inertia, and the sheer dominance of Silicon Valley.

By Kateřina Čajka Zichová (Update EU), Máté Csabai (Magyar Narancs), Lucia Lauková (EU brief), and Adam Radoliński (Focus Europe). Edited by Aneta Zachová (Update EU)

As the geopolitical relationship between the United States and Europe enters a period of unusual uncertainty under the Trump administration, the four Visegrad Group countries – Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland – are confronting an uncomfortable truth: their digital infrastructure is, to a remarkable degree, controlled from abroad.

Experts across the region estimate that public administration in each V4 country relies on American technology for between 80 and 90 percent of its core digital operations. The figure is not merely about office software. It extends to cloud architecture, networking hardware, AI services, and the semiconductor supply chain. The uncomfortable question now being asked – cautiously, and with very different answers – is what, if anything, should be done about it.

A Shared Infrastructure, a Shared Vulnerability

The depth of the dependency is strikingly uniform across the four countries. In Hungary, Csaba Krasznay, associate professor at the University of Public Service, estimates that roughly 80–90 percent of public administration depends on some form of American technology – beginning at the hardware level with processors designed by Intel or AMD, and rising through Microsoft's operating systems and cloud services all the way to Oracle-powered government clouds. In Slovakia, e-government expert Ladislav Kovár describes the dependency in the e-government and public administration sector as "almost absolute", a verdict confirmed in starker terms by the National Agency for Network and Electronic Services (NASES), which stated that the operation of the country's central digital-services portal relies on American manufacturers for all of its key components.

The most visible symbol of this dependence is Microsoft. Hungary's Digital Government Agency purchases Microsoft licences through centralised framework agreements running until 2029. Poland's public institutions are so thoroughly embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem that a report by the Instrat Foundation found a majority of public tender documents explicitly named "Microsoft" or "Office" by name, effectively eliminating competition before it began. In Czechia, a framework agreement worth roughly €575 million was signed in 2024. Slovakia's cumulative drawdown through central Microsoft procurement stood at approximately €59 million as of early 2024.

The risks are not merely financial. Security experts across the region point to the 2018 US Cloud Act, which allows American authorities to request access to data held by US companies even on servers physically located in Europe. This is more than a legal technicality: it means that Hungarian government data stored in a Microsoft data centre in Amsterdam, or Slovak administrative records processed on Oracle's infrastructure, may in principle be accessible to a foreign government.

The Chinese Lesson

The V4 countries have already lived through one version of this debate – with China. Czechia's National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NÚKIB) issued a landmark warning in 2018 against Huawei and ZTE hardware, arguing that Chinese law compels private companies to cooperate with intelligence services. Since then, Chinese vendors have been largely shut out of Czech telecommunications and IT markets.

Yet the Chinese precedent also reveals the limits of the logic. As Slovak security expert Pavol Lupták observes, the solution to Chinese dominance was not to diversify – it was simply to substitute one foreign dependency for another, American one.

"The risk lies in centralisation," he argues, "when one entity has access to data across the entire infrastructure." That critique applies as readily to Microsoft as to Huawei. Hungary is an instructive case: while Chinese vendors have little presence in its IT sector, the facial recognition technology increasingly used by police is predominantly Chinese.

Allies, Not Dependencies

What distinguishes the American question from the Chinese one, across all four countries, is the weight of political alliance. The United States is a NATO partner, a long-standing security guarantor, and – unlike China – a country that has not yet used its technology leverage coercively against European governments. Czech NÚKIB said that the US has long been a trusted ally "not only in security and defence, but also in cybersecurity," and that any reassessment of American technology would require a comprehensive process accounting for many variables — not a reaction to a single political event.

That caution is broadly shared across the region. Czech MEP Ondřej Krutílek expressed the sentiment directly: "I certainly would not jump on a wave of radical anti-Americanism simply because President Trump is currently sitting in the White House." Polish and Slovak officials echo the view, emphasising partnership over confrontation. The contrast with France – which has announced plans to phase out American videoconferencing platforms in public administration by 2027 – is deliberate. The V4 nations see themselves as open-market economies for whom technological protectionism carries its own costs.

The Long Road to Alternatives

Acknowledging the dependency and reducing it are very different things. Hungary's Krasznay estimates that meaningfully cutting reliance on American technology could take at least twenty years and enormous financial investment – and this is a gap that opened in the 1990s, when Europe still had its own chip-making capacity and mobile manufacturers. Countries that have been forced into technological self-reliance by sanctions, such as Russia or Iran, moved 20 to 30 years backwards technologically in the process. That is not a model any V4 government is eager to follow.

Still, efforts are underway, however tentative. Poland is developing a national large language model – PLLuM, now rebranded as AI HUB – built on open-source foundations with the goal of enabling AI deployment without transferring sensitive data outside sovereign control. AI computing infrastructure hubs are being built in Poznań and Kraków. Slovakia is exploring the use of a French-developed language model and has a supercomputer supplied by Eviden, a European firm. Czechia points to Czech internet company Seznam, which is investing in its own servers, data centres, and AI model training. All four countries are nominally participants in the EU's GAIA-X cloud initiative – though critics note that much of GAIA-X's own infrastructure is being built by American companies.

The barriers are structural and cultural as well as financial. Microsoft's ecosystem is embedded in V4 education systems on a generational level – Hungary's Tisztaszoftver Programme has socialised students and teachers into Windows and Office since 2003. Open-source alternatives like Linux exist but remain marginal. "Even if there were strong political will to introduce them," Krasznay notes, "users would be the first to protest, because they are accustomed to a different level of service." There is also an acute shortage of cybersecurity specialists across the region, and state IT contracts routinely lack exit strategies.

Controlling the Data, Not the Country of Origin

The emerging consensus across the V4, articulated most clearly by Czech and Slovak experts, is that the goal is not to replace American technology wholesale – that is neither feasible nor desirable – but to ensure that Europe controls its data, diversifies its supplier relationships, and builds leverage into contracts. As Ondřej Ferdus of the Czech Confederation of Industry puts it: "The key problem is not the country of origin of a technology supplier, but control over data, cybersecurity, infrastructure resilience, and strict compliance with European rules."

The V4 countries are, for now, choosing managed dependence over the disruption of rapid decoupling. Whether that bet pays off depends on factors well beyond their control – the behaviour of the Trump administration, the pace of European technological development, and the willingness of the EU to move from strategy documents to structural investment. For the moment, the lights in government offices from Kraków to Bratislava still run on American silicon.

The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.